“SAFEKEEPING has pages and pages of your black and white photos. Are they all from the walking trip you took through Vermont? How did you match photo to page and text?”

Some of the images appearing in the book came from my archives of photographs. But many of those images were taken during my walks. The work of Wright Morris inspired me to marry text with image. Morris was a photographer first and came to writing later. In the books where his image and text appear together he rarely directly defines text with image, or image with text. Instead he asks the reader to make a leap. To try to understand why he selected that image to be placed with that particular piece of his story. The result is an invitation for the reader to go more deeply into the story, more deeply into the author’s mind, and more deeply into the writing process. I hope I have given my readers a similarly satisfying experience. Each image is carefully selected (there were thousand and thousands of images to choose from…the blessings of digital photography…an option Wright Morris never had) but each one asks the reader to inhabit the story with Radley in a deep and potent way.